This application is related to a co-pending U.S. patent application US 20140218236 A1 filed on the same day as this application, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
1. Field of the Disclosed Embodiments
This disclosure relates to systems and methods for integrating a mmWave communication link into a heterogeneous cellular/Wi-Fi communication system to provide users with the benefits of synergistic application of mmWave technology with the other communication technologies in a network environment.
2. Related Art
Commercial wireless telephony worldwide has undergone several generational changes since its introduction. The capabilities of the earliest mobile telephone devices were generally limited to making domestic telephone calls within limited coverage areas. As the capacity and coverage areas of commercial wireless telephone carriers increased, so too did the capacity and capability of the individual hand-held cellular telephone devices, even as the physical size of these devices decreased. These devices operated then, and continue to operate, in the licensed spectrum where service providers generally seek to provide a certain Quality of Experience (QoE) to their users.
Separately, wireless computing technologies have emerged and matured. Developments in this area of wireless communication technology have equally expanded well beyond the initial capacity to allow, for example, one computer to wirelessly communicate with another computer in a wireless local area network (WLAN) environment. The advancements in this wireless communication technology area have led to dramatic increases in the availability of wireless access points and application providers providing tremendously capable application for wireless devices accessing networks via the available wireless access points.
For a long time, each of the above commercial communication technology efforts were developed and refined separately, each directed at meeting a certain reasonably specific set of communicating requirements. In this regard, each of what are now generally viewed as closely-related technologies matured as largely separate homogeneous communication techniques.
More recently, with the extensive increase in the numbers and types of wireless client devices accessing all manner of wireless networks via various communication paths, the separate technologies that were developed in the general field of wireless communications have been merged to some extent. Current wireless client devices are loaded with far-reaching and increasingly capable libraries of individual applications that provide the wireless client devices with the capacity to undertake all manner of tasks in communication with wireless networks and commercial communication networks to which the wireless client devices gain access by the various paths communication paths or links.
Current commercially-available wireless hand-held client devices such as, for example, smartphones, tablets, PDAs and the like, are able to access commercially available wireless networks in the licensed spectrum for cellular telephone communication and other purposes, as well as accessing local wireless access points with integral wireless receivers in the wireless client devices for short range communication in the unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum. A single wireless client device is able to employ separate radios to make use of separate and diverse communication paths or links as a heterogeneous communicating device combining the benefits of the communication technology in a seemingly integrated manner to benefit the user of the wireless client device.
The future of wireless network communication and electronic communication, in general, will likely take place in an increasingly heterogeneous communicating environment. Sample individual communication links to which heterogeneous wireless hand-held client devices currently gain access include wireless local/metropolitan access networks (WLANs/WMANs), cellular telephone networks, Bluetooth® networks and the like. Efforts to date have centered on developing individual wireless client devices that have capabilities to access these differing network technologies that include communications that are broadcast omnidirectionally. A drawback in these systems, as currently fielded, is their inability to cope with rapidly accelerating demands for increasing data throughput.
Millimeter Wave (mmWave) communication provides a currently-available communication technology available to address the above shortcoming. Transmitting, for example, in the 60 GHz wavelength range offers extremely high data throughputs as a result of the ultra-wide bandwidth available. A tradeoff is that communications in this frequency range are highly directional with directional antenna beam forming arrays being required to sustain reasonable transmission distances based on the atmospheric absorption of the transmitted RF energy. This is at once an advantage and a drawback of the use of mmWave technology for certain applications. An ability to provide secure, straight-line, high data rate communications is a significant plus. This is balanced by the need to constantly reshape the transmission beam through some manner of beamforming when communicating with a mobile receiver, as is generally the case when communicating with wireless hand-held client devices. The beamforming effort itself requires significant computing overhead.